And, of course, it gets even worse when you divide that 13,000 jobs by the 57 states that Obama claimed he had visited [I’d forgive him for that if he were born in Kenya; but given that he claims to be a natural-born American, the ’57 states’ thing will always remain an example of the quintessential ignorance about America and everything American of our current president to me].

260 jobs per state. That’s a record to boast about. Want to wait in a line to get one of those jobs?

The private sector of the U.S. economy added only 13,000 jobs in June, according to ADP employment services, a disappointing number that came in below estimates and portends bad things from the government’s June jobs report due out Friday.

In May, according to ADP, the private sector added 57,000 jobs. But in June? Statistically, across a workforce as big as the United States’? Zero job growth; 13,000 new jobs is a statistically meaningless number.

This is bad news for the economy. If the ADP report is seconded by the Labor Department’s June jobs report, it means that the private sector — which is the engine of growth in this economy, lest we’ve forgotten that, amid all of our various government stimulus programs and subsides — is refusing to add jobs. That means employers are not comfortable enough with their prospects to hire.

In May, according to the government, the economy added more than 440,000 jobs. But almost every one of those was a census worker, jobs that will go away when the count ends in the fall.

Today’s report adds to concerns that the economic recovery is stalling and gives ammunition to the more bearish among us who worry that we’re headed into a double-dip recession.

Now we find that same guy saying all the jobs that were lost are gone forever. How’s that for the stimulus working beyond your wildest dreams?

Gateway Pundit includes a graph summarizing the results of Obama’s wreckovery:

Let’s see. Thanks to Obama, taxes on businesses are going to skyrocket – especially the small businesses, who file primarily as individuals and therefore fall prey to Obama’s shocking increases on those earning more than $250,000 a year. Businesses are being forced to take into account that they won’t have nearly as much money under Obama, and must therefore plan accordingly.

… Obama’s stated plan to raise taxes on households making $250,000 or more in income is a tax increase on small business. The simple answer to this dilemma can be found in the IRS Statistics of Income Bulletin (Table 1.4, for those who are interested).So what do the data say?

In 2006 (the latest year available), $706 billion of such income was reported to the Internal Revenue Service. Of this, about half was reported by households in the top marginal income tax rate. Interestingly, two-thirds of this income was reported by households making $250,000 per year or more — the very same households that Obama wants to increase taxes on.

Intellectually bankrupt liberals are hyping the Marxist class warfare strategy of demonizing businesses. But when the government taxes businesses and business owners, businesses and those who own them merely a) raise their prices and pass those taxes on to you the customer, and b) invest less and hire less. And who ends up getting hurt the most?

Thanks to Obama, taxes on those who create wealth and build the economy by investment are going to shelter their money. Stephen Moore put it this way:

[I]f you think it’s bad this year, you’re right. It’s going to get a whole lot worse next year because the Bush tax cuts expire. That means that we’re going to see an increase in the capital gains tax. We’re going to see an increase in the tax on dividends, perhaps a doubling or tripling of that tax. And then we’re also talking about higher income tax rates next year. So this is going to be a tough year this year, but I think things get a whole lot worse next year as we see rates across the board increase. And let’s not forget, there’s also a lot of talk about a value-added tax on top of all of that. […]

[T]here’s something called the Laffer curve, and that’s especially true with these investment taxes. I think it’s a big mistake to be raising taxes on stocks and investment at the very time we need businesses to be doing more investment. So a lot of economists think we’re going to have a pretty good year this year, in 2010, but once those new taxes kick in, in 2011, might cause a double-dip recession.

Intellectually bankrupt liberals are hyping the Marxist class warfare strategy of demonizing private investors. But they are trying to kill the geese that lay the golden eggs. Rich private investors create opportunities for businesses to grow by their investments. And private investors – who are investing their own money rather than someone else’s as government bureaucrats always do – are rewarding well-run businesses that will make the most of their capital to most effectively expand and create jobs.

If you tax the investments and seize the profits that investors took risks to obtain, then they will risk less and invest less. It is as simple as that. You are killing businesses by taking away the investments that sustain their growth.

It’s been a banner week for Democrats: ObamaCare passed Congress in its final form on Thursday night, and the returns are already rolling in. Yesterday AT&T announced that it will be forced to make a $1 billion writedown due solely to the health bill, in what has become a wave of such corporate losses.

This wholesale destruction of wealth and capital came with more than ample warning. Turning over every couch cushion to make their new entitlement look affordable under Beltway accounting rules, Democrats decided to raise taxes on companies that do the public service of offering prescription drug benefits to their retirees instead of dumping them into Medicare. We and others warned this would lead to AT&T-like results, but like so many other ObamaCare objections Democrats waved them off as self-serving or “political.”

Dumbass quiz: do you think that makes a business more or less likely to hire a new employee?

While certain ramifications of the legislation will only emerge over the coming years, our initial reaction is that this bill will further hinder the U.S. economy’s already fragile recovery. Tough new restrictions on traditional credit products and more onerous capital requirements will further curtail credit availability and product innovation, including affordable credit options designed for higher-risk customer segments. As a result, both industry and economic growth will likely be suppressed for an extended period as banks continue to de-leverage and develop a more thorough understanding of the broad-based structural changes likely to affect the industry in the coming years.

There seems to be a genius to Obama’s incompetence. He is failing on so many levels, in so many ways, all at the same time, that nobody can possibly keep track of them all.

Which means, paradoxically, that the more failures Obama accumulates, the better he looks, as coverage of all the failure is dissipated such that nothing receives the focus it needs to penetrate the American culture of distraction.

Obama is turning to Bush’s general and Bush’s Secretary of Defense in order to overcome the failure created by utterly failed Democrat Party ideas.

Chief among those utterly failed Democrat ideas is the timetable for cut-and-run. Democrats wanted to impose this guaranteed-to-fail strategy for Iraq, but Bush prevailed and won the war. Now they want to make sure we lose in Afghanistan, as Afghans who want to stay alive realize who will still be there a year from now (i.e., the Taliban), and who won’t (i.e., the United States), and that they’d better not ally themselves with their “timetable for withdrawal” all-too-temporary American allies.

Of course, the failure in Afghanistan comes as a welcome relief to day 72 of the even bigger failure in the Gulf of Mexico.

The leftwing media is essentially shouting, “Hey, take your eye off that total failure over there on the Gulf Coast. Look over here!!! Obama fired a guy that pricked his thin-skin and appointed Bush’s general to save his liberal ass. And he gave a speech!!! Don’t waste your time thinking about the fact that BP took the cap off the leaking hole so that 104,000 gallons of oil per hour could pour out of the sea floor. Don’t look at the possibility that as much as 4.2 million gallons of oil are pouring out of that damn hole Obama can’t plug every single day!!!

Where are we supposed to look to see an area in which Obama HASN’T failed?

Look at everything, if you have time to contemplate all the failure that Obama has brought. But don’t be distracted from taking time to watch the spill cam footage every day, or following the latest tracking of Obama’s oil spill and its contamination of the Gulf Coast, or following the Obama-regime-caused inability to clean up the mess.

As you watch the daily disaster unfolding, don’t forget to remember that Obama is the guy running the show. Or that the show looks like a chicken running around after its head has been cut off

President Barack Obama welcomed Russian President Dmitry Medvedev to the White House on Thursday, boasting that the two men have reset their countries’ relationship in a way unthinkable when Obama took office.

Russian media has been poking fun at US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton after she gave her Russian counterpart a “reset” button with an ironic misspelling.Clinton’s gift to Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov at their meeting in Geneva on Friday evening was meant to underscore the Obama administration’s readiness to “to press the reset button” in ties with Moscow.

But instead of the Russian word for “reset” (perezagruzka) it featured a slightly different word meaning “overload” or “overcharged” (peregruzka).

Newsweek sure isn’t very impressed with Obama’s “reset.” They point out that it’s cost us a whole bunch while delivering virtually nothing beyond Obama being able to boast vacuously about a “reset”:

The problem, though, is that all this good will has been bought almost exclusively at Obama’s expense. The United States disappointed allies in Eastern Europe by scrapping plans to station missile-defense batteries in Poland and the Czech Republic, all in order to please Moscow. The Russian occupation of Georgia, America’s best friend in the former Soviet Union, has effectively been acknowledged as a fait accompli by Washington, again to please the Kremlin. At the same time, Washington has remained silent about increasing crackdowns on freedom of assembly inside Russia and the ongoing second trial of oligarch Mikhail Khodorkovsky.

And what has Obama bought with all these diplomatic sacrifices? The list is pretty short.

Do you think that Ronald Reagan would have gone to Russia and honored Stalin’s “Great Patriotic War”?

That is part of the reason why Barack Obama isn’t worth one of Ronald Reagan’s toilet leavings.

What is hilarious in its sheer ironic patheticness is that just a day after Obama announces his “reset,” we find this report coming just minutes ago (as of Monday, June 28):

WASHINGTON — Ten Russian intelligence officers have been arrested in the U.S. for allegedly serving as illegal agents tasked with recruiting political sources and gathering information to send back to Moscow, the Justice Department said Monday.

Eight of 10 were arrested Sunday for allegedly carrying out long-term, “deep cover” assignments on behalf of Russia. Two others were arrested for allegedly participating in the same Russian intelligence program within the United States.

Ooops. Looks like Obama’s going to need yet a third “reset” with his former KGB buddy Vladimir Putin.

The US remained the world’s biggest manufacturing nation by output last year, but is poised to relinquish this slot in 2011 to China – thus ending a 110-year run as the number one country in factory production.

The figures are revealed in a league table being published on Monday by IHS Global Insight, a US-based economics consultancy.

A 110-year consecutive run is no match for the biggest failure to ever occupy the White House.

OBAMA: The US economy for a long period of time was the engine of world economic growth. We were sucking in imports from all across the world financed by huge amounts of consumer debt. Because of the financial crisis, but also because that debt was fundamentally unsustainable, the United States is not going to be able to serve in that same capacity to that same extent.

How’s that for a “can’t do” attitude. “Yes we can,” you say? Apparently not!

Hey, I have an idea: why don’t we borrow another three trillion dollars from China, squander it stupidly, and then pay the Chinese exorbitant interest rates that eat us alive for the next 20 centuries or so? And, of course, we can just give all our land to them if we can’t make good on the payments. That ought to help us, right?

Would you call it a disastrous trip?Maybe not disastrous, but memorable. You will hear about Vice President Joe Biden’s trip to the Wisconsin custard shop many times over the course of the next five months.

The simple campaign-like stop will give conservatives even more ammunition in an upcoming midterm election season that already looks ominous for President Obama.

Walking into a custard shop and asking where the ice cream is isn’t a huge offense. Homer Simpson would do it. Joe Biden did that when visiting a Kopp’s Frozen Custard store in Wisconsin on Friday.

However, it was the follow-up exchange that’s generating a lot of buzz.

After Biden gets his custard, he asks the store manager how much he owes him.

It’s odd that Biden didn’t have something to say because politicians get hit on this all the time. Republican or Democrat, people always tell elected officials they want their taxes lowered.

You would expect a “God love ya, we’re doin’ everything we can to get the economy jump-started again.”

A few minutes later, Biden is caught on video again telling the manager: “Why don’t you say something nice instead of being a smartass all the time? Say something nice.”

The manager went on to tell a local TV reporter that the vice president went up to him later and whispered that he was just joking. The manager also said, however, it didn’t appear to him that Biden appreciated the comment.

Everyone could get a charge of out that, saying that was Joe Biden just being Joe Biden. But this one’s different. Telling a voter he’s a “smartass” for requesting lower taxes is something the Republicans can and will use.

One thing’s for sure: The term has just entered the 2010 official election lexicon.

I’m so sorry it bothers you that your socialism is bothering us, Joe.

It’s funny. Dick Cheney could say “Good morning” and be attacked by the media. Joe Biden can be a 100% pure distilled a$$hole and get a complete pass.

We’re smartasses for wanting lower taxes. I suppose we’re something REALLY nasty for expecting the federal government to do anything at all to enforce our borders.

Imagine the New York Times assigning a reporter to cover liberalism and the liberal agenda. They pass this reporter off as being himself a liberal, but he’s really a plant. He personally despises liberals and hates the liberal agenda, and is only on staff to sabotage the liberal movement by continually reporting a slanted picture of on only the worst aspects of liberalism.

Don’t worry, liberals. You can stop hyperventilating. Such a thing will never happen. You don’t have to worry. Every story you read will be doctrinally pure leftist propaganda.

But that is precisely what the mainstream media does to conservatives 60 seconds every minute, 60 minutes every hour, 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, and so on.

The leftwing bias and total lack of objectivity is simply unrelenting.

UPDATE | Lachlan Markay – 6/25, 3:00 PM: A roundup of reactions from all over the blogosphere and twitterverse below the fold. Washington Post blogger Dave Weigel resigned today after a host of offensive e-mails surfaced revealing his disdain for much of the right – the beat he was charged with covering. Fishbowl DC, which published a number of those emails yesterday, confirmed the resignation with the Post just after noon.

Yesterday I reported on leaked emails from Weigel to a listserve of liberal journalists bashing conservatives and conservatism – you know, the people Weigel is supposed to be covering. As bad as those email were, a plethora of messages from Weigel published in the Daily Caller take the conservative-bashing to a whole new level.

The new emails also demonstrated that yesterday’s quasi-apology from Weigel was really not as sincere as he claimed. He said that he made some of his most offensive remarks at the end of a bad day. But these new emails show that there was really nothing unique about them, and that offensive remarks about conservatives really were nothing new or uncommon.

Many of the misguided statements were clearly made in jest – “I hope he fails,” Weigel said of Rush Limbaugh after the radio host was hospitalized with chest pains, a reference to Limbaugh’s hope that Obama’s agenda would fail. But other bouts of name calling – ragging on the “outbursts of racism” from “amoral blowhard” Newt Gingrich, for instance – were obviously not jokes.

The Daily Caller revealed some quite stunning statements from the JournoList in its piece today:

“Honestly, it’s been tough to find fresh angles sometimes–how many times can I report that these [tea party] activists are joyfully signing up with the agenda of discredited right-winger X and discredited right-wing group Y?” Weigel lamented in one February email.

In other posts, Weigel describes conservatives as using the media to “violently, angrily divide America.” According to Weigel, their motives include “racism” and protecting “white privilege,” and for some of the top conservatives in D.C., a nihilistic thirst for power.

“There’s also the fact that neither the pundits, nor possibly the Republicans, will be punished for their crazy outbursts of racism. Newt Gingrich is an amoral blowhard who resigned in disgrace, and Pat Buchanan is an anti-Semite who was drummed out of the movement by William F. Buckley. Both are now polluting my inbox and TV with their bellowing and minority-bashing. They’re never going to go away or be deprived of their soapboxes,” Weigel wrote.

Of Matt Drudge, Weigel remarked, “It’s really a disgrace that an amoral shut-in like Drudge maintains the influence he does on the news cycle while gay-baiting, lying, and flubbing facts to this degree.”…

Republicans? “Ratf–king [Obama] on every bill.” Palin? Tried to “ratf–k” a moderate Republican in a contentious primary in New York. Limbaugh? Used “ratf–king tactics” in urging Republican activists to vote for Hillary Clinton in open primaries after Obama had all but beat her for the Democratic nomination.

Weigel continued to defend these outbursts, as he did when contacted by the Daily Caller. “My reporting, I think, stands for itself,” he said. “I’ve always been of the belief that you could have opinions and could report anyway… people aren’t usually asked to stand or fall on everything they’ve said in private.”

First, there’s the issue of whether anything said on a 400-member email list can really be considered “private.” “There’s no such thing as off-the-record with 400 people,” Nation columnist Eric Alterman told Politico.

But the real issues are, first, whether such mean-spirited jabs demonstrate a disdain for many conservatives that precludes Weigel from covering them fairly (he did label gay marriage opponents “bigots,” after all), and second, whether the Post feels it is appropriate to have someone hostile to the right covering conservatism, while a through-and-through liberal in Ezra Klein covers the left.

The Post signaled that it did not consider Weigel’s comments to be a serious problem. It seems that attitude has changed.

Managing Editor Raju Narisetti told Politico that “Dave’s apology to readers reflects he understands, in calmer hindsight, the need to exercise good judgment at all times and of not throwing stones, especially when operating from inside an echo-filled glass house that is modern-day digital journalism.” He added that it was “time to move on.”

The Post declined comment on Weigel’s resignation.

*****UPDATE

Below is a roundup of reactions from prominent online commentators since Weigel’s resignation.

Politico’s Ben Smith paints Weigel as an unfortunate casualty of the collapsing facade of objectivity in the Post’s online efforts.

The current flap over Washington Post blogger Dave Weigel has its roots in a fact that suprised me when I learned of it earlier this year: The Post appears to have hired Weigel, a liberal blogger, under the false impression that he’s a conservative. The new controversy over the revelation that he’s liberal is primarily the Post’s fault, not his, except to the degree that he allowed the paper’s brass to put him in an unsustainable position.

Having an anthropological study of conservatives, such as Dave provides, would work if the Post had a similar anthropological look at liberals from someone on the outside to balance it. As it stands, however, Post readers get a Conservatives In The Mist approach that seems to predicate itself on the belief that they can’t figure conservatives and conservatism out for themselves. That’s not a reflection on Dave, but a criticism of the editorial decision to pursue a one-sided strategy of critical analysis at the Post.

And indeed, one of the most interesting elements of the reaction to Weigel’s resignation seems to be the admission, or at least the acknowledgment, that he is, in fact, a liberal. The “libertarian” label seemed to stick.

But today, Weigel’s liberalism was treated as a given. Even Keith Olbermann, on whose show Weigel is a regular guest, tweeted his agreement: “If the WaPost didn’t know @DaveWeigel wasn’t a conservative blogger, it’s time for the Post to FOLD. My full support is yours, David.”

At the Atlantic, Jefferey Goldberg made that observation almost in passing. Goldberg went on to make what has been (somewhat surprisingly) a sparsely invoked argument in the hours since Weigel’s resignation: that the crudity of his comments itself was enough to sully his reporting.

Media consultant Josh Treviño claimed on Twitter that “nearly all journalists mock their subjects. Maybe not the ones covering elementary schools. But all the others.” But Goldberg disagrees:

“How could we destroy our standards by hiring a guy stupid enough to write about people that way in a public forum?” one of my friends at the Post asked me when we spoke earlier today. “I’m not suggesting that many people on the paper don’t lean left, but there’s leaning left, and then there’s behaving like an idiot.”

I gave my friend the answer he already knew: The sad truth is that the Washington Post, in its general desperation for page views, now hires people who came up in journalism without much adult supervision, and without the proper amount of toilet-training. This little episode today is proof of this. But it is also proof that some people at the Post (where I worked, briefly, 20 years ago) still know the difference between acceptable behavior and unacceptable behavior, and that maybe this episode will lead to the reimposition of some level of standards.

Others, such as NewsBusters contributor Dan Gainor and National Review’s Jim Geraghty, attributed Weigel’s decline not so much to the language he used as to his style of reporting; his tenancy to seek out the fringe elements of the movement, and focus on them, rather than on mainstream conservatism.

As Gainor said in a statement today,

Weigel’s rapid meltdown showed the incredible danger for traditional media to play fast and loose mixing news and opinion. The Post was either unwilling or unable to find a neutral reporter to cover conservatives. Nor did it hire an actual advocate as it has done for the left with Ezra Klein. Instead, the Post brought in someone who tried to tear down conservatives and look at the right as if he were visiting a zoo. This disaster should be proof enough that their method was a failure.

Dave only fits the loosest definition of conservative; I think he’s best defined as a left-leaning, idiosyncratic libertarian. He is also a political junkie with a voluminous appetite for news and a dogged reporter. From where I sit, he spends too much time writing about fringe figures and trends that are largely irrelevant to national politics (Orly Taitz, Birthers, etc.) but perhaps that’s his genuine fascination and/or what his employers wanted. Righties suspected Dave wanted to spotlight the freakiest and least appealing self-proclaimed “conservatives”; I suspect that at least part of Dave’s mentality was simply, “You have got to hear what this lunatic is saying.”

Journalism is a field that basically only hires liberals. Like another liberal-dominated field – education – it basically maintains standards of ideological purity that rival the Nazi or Communist Parties in their worst days of yore. Journalism is dead in America, and liberals were the murderers.

Education is likewise dead. Like the unions that destroyed every single other industry they touched, liberals have destroyed education – turning it into leftist indoctrination – just as liberals turned journalism into leftist propaganda.

You will never see a day in which half of all reporters, journalists, and op-ed writers are conservatives. The status quo is hard-core liberalism; and the field of journalism will maintain that status quo at absolutely all costs – even as the liberal dinosaur media shrink into bankruptcy or laughably low ratings and readership.

Which means any scintilla of objectivity is a farce.

The most asinine thing of all is this notion that reporters – who are so overwhelmingly liberal it is absurd – somehow believe that they can think conservatives are not only stupid, but genuinely evil, while at the same time believing that liberals are both intelligent and virtuous, are somehow able to cover both sides fairly and objectively.

In that regard, journalists are so arrogant, and so transcendentally stupid, that it defies all rationality.

U.S. District Court Judge Martin Feldman, who overturned the Obama moratorium on drilling in over 500 feet of water in the Gulf, now has to have federal marshalls protect him because of death threats against him.

It doesn’t matter if virtually all the actual violent acts and threats of violent acts are coming from the left. It’s all the tea party’s fault.

It also doesn’t matter that Article. IV., Section. 4 of the Constitution states, “The United States shall guarantee to every State in this Union, a Republican Form of Government, and shall protect each of them against Invasion.”

Mexican drug cartels have set up shop on American soil, maintaining lookout bases in strategic locations in the hills of southern Arizona from which their scouts can monitor every move made by law enforcement officials, federal agents tell Fox News.

The scouts are supplied by drivers who bring them food, water, batteries for radios — all the items they need to stay in the wilderness for a long time.

“To say that this area is out of control is an understatement,” said an agent who patrols the area and asked not to be named. “We (federal border agents), as well as the Pima County Sheriff Office and the Bureau of Land Management, can attest to that.”

A Mexican drug cartel has threatened police officers in Arizona who confiscated a marijuana shipment, prompting the small town department to warn its officers to remain armed and have radios with them at all times, and keep their body armor handy.

It doesn’t matter that the Arizona law is completely constitutional, or that the Arizona law actually merely gives the state the power to enforce existing federal law, or that Arizona actually watered the law down to deal with the avalanche of lies being told by the left:

The simple fact of the matter is that the federal law is FAR “harsher” or “more racist” than the Arizona law (see also here for a more detailed analysis). The Supreme Court has ruled unanimously (that means even Ruth Bader Ginsburg voted for it!) in the 2005 Mueller v. Mena case that the federal authorities have the right to demand citizenship status at any time for any reason without the need to demonstrate reasonable suspicion [Muehler v. Mena, 544 U.S. 93 (2005) (“the officers did not need reasonable suspicion to ask Mena for her . . . immigration status.”)]. The Arizona law is actually FAR more restrictive than the current federal law that the Obama White House WILL NOT ENFORCE. And the Arizona law is completely constitutional for that reason. The left has demonized, demagogued, and most certainly flat-out lied about the Arizona law.

“Costs on average for every illegal alien headed household about $19,600 more if they consume the city services than they pay in taxes, so the rest of the taxpayers have to part costs. Schools become overcrowded, English as second language programs push out other programs.”

It doesn’t matter that the same illegal immigrants who are a burden to our country are in fact a burden to their own damn country. And that if they’re a burden to their own country, how in the hell are they not a burden to ours?

The Democrat Party demands that nothing be done at all to stop illegal immigration because they believe they can use the issue to demagogue their way to winning the Hispanic vote. The Democrat Party demands that Arizona not be allowed to do anything whatsoever to protect themselves.

It doesn’t matter that the Democrat Party and the mainstream media that writes their propaganda are officially hypocritical, demagogic, and yes, frankly both evil and treasonous as well.

We are becoming an out-of-control society on the verge of collapse, and we need to purge ourselves of Democrats as much as we need to purge illegal immigrants.

So now we know. It is mind-bogglingly inexplicable why this is only emerging now (though I have one theory on that – see below) but it turns out that Rolling Stone did not run all its quotations past McChrystal’s staff as their editor said they did. The general’s staff now say that all the offensive quotations were clearly off the record. So far from this being “terrific journalism” as my colleague Harry Mount put it, the Rolling Stone piece now looks much more like a disgrace to the profession.

I say mind-boggling because if McChrystal’s staff had come out with this in the first few hours of the furore on Tuesday morning then the entire narrative of the week would have changed and the general might very well still be in his job today.

My hunch as to why it didn’t come out earlier? Basically, because McChrystal is an honourable man who thought it would be unseemly to quibble about the details. There could have been a tactical element to that, certainly – perhaps he or his staff calculated that trying to wriggle out of things would not be viewed kindly by Obama and that it could have fuelled a row with Rolling Stone that might have made things worse (if so, how wrong they were).

Politico has a list of the 30 fact-checking questions submitted. The most interesting one is number 30 in which Rolling STone asks whether McChrystal did indeed vote for Obama. The reponse – irony of ironies – was this:

IMPORTANT — PLEASE DO NOT INCLUDE THIS — THIS IS PERSONAL AND PRIVATE INFORMATION AND UNREALTED TO HIS JOB. IT WOULD BE INAPPROPRIATE TO SHARE. MY REASON FOR THIS IS IT WOULD PRESENT AN UNDUE COMMAND INFLLUENCE ON JUNIOR OFFICERS OR SOLDIERS WHO SHOULD MAKE THEIR OWN POLITICAL DECISIONS. THERE ARE VERY STRICT RULES IN THE MILITARY ON SEPARATING CHURCH AND STATE ON THIS SORT OF STUFF – HAVE TO KEEP OUT OF POLITICAL PREFERENCE AND PERSONAL CHOICE.

But, of course, they left it in. It’s difficult to escape the conclusion that Rolling Stone did not care a hoot about the agreed journalistic ground rules or about McChrystal. They were out to get him and get him they did.

This is sadly all history now and nothing can change Obama’s decision. But it would be interesting to know if anyone in the White House even inquired into whether the profane and juvenile quotations about civilian officials were really on the record or if they just took Rolling Stone’s word for it.

If they didn’t, think about what this means: the Obama administration accepts the word of a counter-culture magazine and doesn’t even bother to check with the four-star general commanding 100,000 troops in wartime whose career the magazine is seeking to destroy.

Liberals in the mainstream media hailed the firing of Stanley McChrystal as though it were the most brilliant and courageous act of presidential leadership in world history. It wasn’t. It was a sad and tragic situation – even if Obama did the right thing.

“I am absolutely certain that generations from now, we will be able to look back and tell our children that this was the moment when we began to provide care for the sick and good jobs to the jobless; this was the moment when the rise of the oceans began to slow and our planet began to heal… This was the moment — this was the time — when we came together to remake this great nation …”

We voted for an evil and arrogant man whose only valuable skill was the ability to read from a teleprompter screen.

Barack Obama spent more than 20 years in a church that literally prayed that God would damn America. His personal arrogance invited divine damnation.

It appears we have very likely got what we wanted: an America no longer under God’s protection, but only under Obama’s.

It’s technical, but not intractably so, if you’re willing to concentrate for half an hour and chase down the links.

It’s also deeply pessimistic about our chances of doing anything much about the Gulf oil spill.

In brief:

● BP drills a hole down through many layers of rock, of different strength and consistency, to the oil.

● The oil will then come up through this bore hole at great pressure.

● You do NOT want that pressure forcing the oil sideways into upper levels of the drilled-through rock.

● So you line the bore hole with steel casing, and cement in the space between casing and bore hole wall. This is deep-drilling S.O.P.

● Evidence from the Top Kill failure suggests that this casing-cement system is now fatally compromised.

● So we have “down hole leaks” — oil under colossal pressure forcing its way sideways into below-sea-bed rock formations.

● If you had (which of course we don’t) some massive cork to jam into the top of the bore hole and stop the gusher, all that sideways-leaked oil would just come bursting out through fissures opening up in the sea floor.

● For miles around.

● And even though we don’t have such a cork, the bore hole might collapse in on itself, with the same effect.

As the writer says: “The very least damaging outcome as bad as it is, is that we are stuck with a wide open gusher blowing out 150,000 barrels a day of raw oil or more.”

In slightly different words: The best we can hope for is that the thing just goes on gushing through the bore hole indefinitely. (Or until we can drill enough relief wells to reduce the pressure. Don’t hold your breath.)

I’m as horrified as anyone by this — if the guy has got it right, and I’ve understood him correctly. At the same time, as a constitutional pessimist, I’ll own to a certain grim satisfaction. The infantile optimism of post-JFK America may have met its match down there in the Gulf. Nature is not mocked.

If this analysis is correct, the consequences for America will be so devastating that they can’t be overstated.

The author says “Nature is not mocked.” I say God is not mocked.

Dr. Anne Wortham wrote an inspired article entitled, “No He Can’t” shortly after Obama’s election victory. On her highly insightful view, what won in 2008 was an attitude of helplessness begging for deliverance by a pseudo-messiah of big government socialistic bureaucracy.

A writer from The Times in England, taking note of all the incredible arrogance of the Obama campaign, said the very day after Obama’s inauguration, “Obama may be the ‘no we can’t’ president.” In hindsight, it seems readily obvious that Daniel Finkelstein was right.

Is what is happening God’s divine judgment on America for it’s foolishness and wickedness in electing an evil man? I don’t know. God doesn’t tell me when He’s judging a nation. But I DO know that God DOES judge nations (see Psalm 82:8; 96:10; 110:6; Joel 3:12). And I DO know that even liberal sources such as the Huffington Post (and see also here) and Newsweek are using the word “apocalypse” to describe the terrible Gulf oil disaster. Maybe these liberal and very likely godless writers don’t realize it, but the term “apocalypse” is loaded with the sense of the revealing of divine judgment.

I also know that God is not mocked, and that whatever men sow, they will also reap (Galatians 6:7).

I am not a prophet, and God has not revealed to me that He is judging America for its departing from Him and turning to a false messiah who hates and mocks His ways:

But in my own heart, I believe that God is beginning to judge America by withdrawing His favor from this once great nation.

The following article by Mark Steyn is brilliant. My title isn’t an accurate summary of Steyn’s point (but maybe it got you to read an article you otherwise wouldn’t have read!).

It is certainly beyond hilarious that pro-Obama Democrat Stanley McChrystal and pro-Obama BP are now on the outs in a cloud of self-destruction, while George Bush’s Secretary of Defense and George Bush’s general have been called upon to save the day.

But the real meat of the article gets to the heart of one issue: Barack Obama is an empty suit who stands for nothing beyond self-promoting Barack Obama.

What do Gen. McChrystal and British Petroleum have in common? Aside from the fact that they’re both Democratic Party supporters.

Or they were. Stanley McChrystal is a liberal who voted for Obama and banned Fox News from his HQ TV. Which may at least partly explain how he became the first U.S. general to be lost in combat while giving an interview to Rolling Stone: They’ll be studying that one in war colleges around the world for decades. The management of BP were unable to vote for Obama, being, as we now know, the most sinister duplicitous bunch of shifty Brits to pitch up offshore since the War of 1812. But, in their “Beyond Petroleum” marketing and beyond, they signed on to every modish nostrum of the eco-Left. Their recently retired chairman, Lord Browne, was one of the most prominent promoters of cap-and-trade. BP was the Democrats’ favorite oil company. They were to Obama what Total Fina Elf was to Saddam.

But what do McChrystal’s and BP’s defenestration tell us about the president of the United States? Barack Obama is a thin-skinned man and, according to Britain’s Daily Telegraph, White House aides indicated that what angered the president most about the Rolling Stone piece was “a McChrystal aide saying that McChrystal had thought that Obama was not engaged when they first met last year.” If finding Obama “not engaged” is now a firing offense, who among us is safe?

Only the other day, Florida Sen. George Lemieux attempted to rouse the president to jump-start America’s overpaid, overmanned and oversleeping federal bureaucracy and get it to do something on the oil debacle. There are 2,000 oil skimmers in the United States: Weeks after the spill, only 20 of them are off the coast of Florida. Seventeen friendly nations with great expertise in the field have offered their own skimmers; the Dutch volunteered their “super-skimmers”: Obama turned them all down. Raising the problem, Sen. Lemieux found the president unengaged, and uninformed. “He doesn’t seem to know the situation about foreign skimmers and domestic skimmers,” reported the senator.

He doesn’t seem to know, and he doesn’t seem to care that he doesn’t know, and he doesn’t seem to care that he doesn’t care. “It can seem that at the heart of Barack Obama’s foreign policy is no heart at all,” wrote Richard Cohen in The Washington Post last week. “For instance, it’s not clear that Obama is appalled by China’s appalling human-rights record. He seems hardly stirred about continued repression in Russia.

The president seems to stand foursquare for nothing much.

“This, of course, is the Obama enigma: Who is this guy? What are his core beliefs?”

Gee, if only your newspaper had thought to ask those fascinating questions oh, say, a month before the Iowa caucuses.

And even today Cohen is still giving President Whoisthisguy a pass.

After all, whatever he feels about “China’s appalling human-rights record” or “continued repression in Russia,” Obama is not directly responsible for it. Whereas the U.S. and allied deaths in Afghanistan are happening on his watch – and the border villagers killed by unmanned drones are being killed at his behest. Cohen calls the president “above all, a pragmatist,” but with the best will in the world you can’t stretch the definition of “pragmatism” to mean “lack of interest.”

“The ugly truth,” wrote Thomas Friedman in The New York Times, “is that no one in the Obama White House wanted this Afghan surge. The only reason they proceeded was because no one knew how to get out of it.”

Well, that’s certainly ugly, but is it the truth? Afghanistan, you’ll recall, was supposed to be the Democrats’ war, the one they allegedly supported, the one the neocons’ Iraq adventure was an unnecessary distraction from. Granted the Dems’ usual shell game – to avoid looking soft on national security, it helps to be in favor of some war other than the one you’re opposing – Candidate Obama was an especially ripe promoter. In one of the livelier moments of his campaign, he chugged down half a bottle of Geopolitical Viagra and claimed he was hot for invading Pakistan.

Then he found himself in the Oval Office, and the dime-store opportunism was no longer helpful. But, as Friedman puts it, “no one knew how to get out of it.” The “pragmatist” settled for “nuance”: He announced a semisurge plus a date for withdrawal of troops to begin. It’s not “victory,” it’s not “defeat,” but rather a more sophisticated mélange of these two outmoded absolutes: If you need a word, “quagmire” would seem to cover it.

Hamid Karzai, the Taliban and the Pakistanis, on the one hand, and Britain and the other American allies heading for the check-out, on the other, all seem to have grasped the essentials of the message, even if Friedman and the other media Obammyboppers never quite did. Karzai is now talking to Islamabad about an accommodation that would see the most viscerally anti-American elements of the Taliban back in Kabul as part of a power-sharing regime. At the height of the shrillest shrieking about the Iraqi “quagmire,” was there ever any talk of hard-core Saddamite Baathists returning to government in Baghdad?

To return to Cohen’s question: “Who is this guy? What are his core beliefs?” Well, he’s a guy who was wafted ever upward – from the Harvard Law Review to state legislator to United States senator – without ever lingering long enough to accomplish anything. “Who is this guy?” Well, when a guy becomes a credible presidential candidate by his mid-40s with no accomplishments other than a couple of memoirs, he evidently has an extraordinary talent for self-promotion, if nothing else. “What are his core beliefs?” It would seem likely that his core belief is in himself. It’s the “nothing else” that the likes of Cohen are belatedly noticing.

Wasn’t he kind of unengaged by the health care debate? That’s why, for all his speeches, he could never quite articulate a rationale for it. In the end, he was happy to leave it to the Democratic Congress and, when his powers of persuasion failed, let them ram it down the throats of the American people through sheer parliamentary muscle.

Likewise, on Afghanistan, his attitude seems to be “I don’t want to hear about it.” Unmanned drones take care of a lot of that, for a while. So do his courtiers in the media: Did all those hopeychangers realize that Obama’s war would be run by Bush’s defense secretary and Bush’s general?

Hey, never mind: the Moveon.org folks have quietly removed their celebrated “General Betray-us” ad from their website. Cindy Sheehan, the supposed conscience of the nation when she was railing against Bush from the front pages, is an irrelevant kook unworthy of coverage when she protests Obama. Why, a cynic might almost think the “anti-war” movement was really an anti-Bush movement, and that they really don’t care about dead foreigners after all. Plus ça change you can believe in, plus c’est la même chose.

Except in one respect. There is a big hole where our strategy should be.

It’s hard to fight a war without war aims, and, in the end, they can only come from the top. It took the oil spill to alert Americans to the unengaged president. From Moscow to Tehran to the caves of Waziristan, our enemies got the message a lot earlier – and long ago figured out the rules of unengagement.

Too bad we elected a president who has a narcissism complex where his conscience should be and a vacuum where his soul should be.